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New App LagFix Looks to Fix Your Lag Issues, What Else Would It Do?

Lag happens, it is an unfortunate truth in the world of rooting and running custom ROM’s. Developers have long looked into the underlying problem and as to why lag occurs, but of course, we are still waiting on a permanent death to lag. According to the developer of LagFix, he believes he has created a solution to the issue and has released this tool to counteract it.

The source of the problem is that internal storage is not properly TRIMmed when needed. You can find lots of information on XDA. It is also well-known fact that running fstrim Linux tool from time to time fixes the issue until internal memory runs out of free blocks. Other solutions like mounting with -discard or disabling fsync may be slow or dangerous.

LagFix is a user-friendly implementation of fstrim utility. It allows you to select which partitions to trim (you should leave defaults unless you know what you are doing) and run the process easily.

The app is recommended for advanced users only, since performing some of these tasks that directly impact your system could potentially harm your device. And you know what, I don’t want that on my conscience, so if you use the app, please be careful. Again, it is for rooted users only.

So far on Google Play, the app has been met with high praise. If you are brave and your phone is rooted, try it out and let us know your results.

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The lag is why, for me, Android sucks. The only thing that has been done to “fix it” is to disguise it by building faster phones. Meanwhile, there are still major problems with the OS that are patched by apps like this. There is no lag on my iPhone, but there is on my old Android phones and the Android tablet that I bought on a whim (what a waste of money); the only thing it’s good for now is as an alarm clock. The browser sucks and the OS makes simple tasks look complicated. I don’t know why Android fans put up with it.

Brian_2112

It’s a small price to pay, for the most part. With custom ROMs, especially ones that are unofficial ports of other OS versions, it’s going to happen. We deal with it, mainly because experiencing occasional (or sometimes more frequent) lag is worth it if it means having a device that we can control almost completely. Processor/kernel modification, plenty of UI customization, software/firmware tweaks…all the things iPhone users like yourself are unable to enjoy. I don’t know why iOS fans put up with it.

iPhone-Life

Why do you need an app to get rid of lag? My iPhone doesn’t lag at all. Weird.

You know what’s ironic, the GSIII/Note II cost as much if not more than the iPhone.

iPhone-Life

You’re missing the point. Android is the Walmart of the smartphone world. Or, better said, the Kia of smartphones. Don’t like that one? How about the McDonald’s/Starbucks of smartphones? Just because they’re everywhere, doesn’t make them good. Point is, they do a good job of flooding the market with cheap smartphones, and that’s what most consumers want. Doesn’t make the good or bad, you just get cheap when something is given away. You get what you pay for, is all. And, isn’t Samsung looking to drop Android for Tizen? What are you going to do with yourself when Samsung realizes that they can do better and all you have left to buy is a pre-paid Android phone from (name your kiosk here). Or, maybe they’ll just start including them in happy meals.

See, that”s why we don’t like you iphone people. You think you’re better than the rest of the world, damn elitists! If you’re so f***ing cool then why are you trolling around our android forums? Rubbing elbows with the “Walmart smartphone buyers” of the world? Get out of here and feel free to suck as many d***s as you can handle on the way out!

P. S. in terms of performance S3 beats the tits off of any iphone I’ve ever toyed around with, which is all of them. And I can actually see my screen without a magnifying glass

JoshGroff

I haven’t toyed around with the 5, but my CM10 Rezound blows away the 4S, and has a much better screen, which is what I really care about.

JoshGroff

If Apple offered an unlocked, open source iPhone, I’d gladly buy it, but I love tinkering too much to have a locked down device. Also, there are other major players in Android, and it’s doubtful that Samsung will get away from Android completely with the Success it’s brought them.

When your device’s UI is so slow that you dont notice lag, how can it be good?

iPhone-Life

Android has had an issue with lag since day one. If Android wasn’t laggy, why would there be an app? Why would this article exist at all? Just sayin’. But, to humor you, I have yet to read about lag on an iPhone. As for being slow, back up your statement, don’t just throw out a random red herring.

Didn’t really seem to make a difference on my Galaxy Nexus running JBSourcery 4.4 but then again all this does is garbage collection so it won’t give you immediate benefits. Although it did TRIM about 1.7 GB worth of space on my 32 GB device.

TheOiulkj

Man, if only this came out one day earlier. My old gnex AOKP set up with 200+ apps installed ran miserably slow. It would have been a prime target to test this out on.

But it crashed into a bootloop last night and I threw a fresh install of Liquid Smooth on it. Runs like water now. Only a matter of time before I have a quarter thousand apps installed though, so I shall preemptively install this and save it for the future 😛

this seems to be working wonders for my Galaxy Nexus and my Nexus 7, but if any difference, it’s pretty minimal for my Note 2. It’s working a lot better then Seeder though.

Evan Wickes

does anyone have any details… some people are noticing increases but they arent mentioning specifics, *(rom, kernel, currents fix, benchmarks – before & after)*. i’m not sold yet. i’m sure google will comment soon. Droid-Life, please keep us posted.

i didn’t notice any difference on my galaxy nexus (CM10.1 M1 with Frankos kernel nightly 361)
i DID notice a difference on my nexus 7 though. i cannot pinpoint the lage that i am seeing or where it is coming from, but after install, and playing with it for a little bit, the lag seems to be gone. will be putting it though its paces again after work today. (it also runs CM10.1 M1 with frankos latest nightly kernel)

Evan Wickes

thanks for giving some specifics. i hate when people say “yep, it works” & that is all. i still will wait for google’s comments. they will test & update the community. if it works, maybe they’ll quickly release a 4.2.2 but it should def be in keylime pie (4.3 or 5.0)

An operating system known to install updates that cause even more problems than before? I’ll pass.

mgamerz

Lag is caused by the garbage collector. Any app dev knows this.

VoiceofSky

i don’t get it,i have a custom ROM and its Smoother than butter ..and butter is pretty damn smooth ..So does this make it..slippery? 😉

Frogskins

My Gnex running Liquid Smooth and Lean Kernel was fast enough. Adding this made no difference. I also do not run Seeder on my GNex as I see no help. On my N7, I do see a difference running AOSP 4.2.1

br_hermon

Don’t know how accurate it is but… someone in the comments over at Android Police said it’s because Google built in “discard” into 4.2.1 (essentially took what this app does and applied it to stock android source) so lagfix won’t help anyone on stock or AOSP.

kixofmyg0t

You’re right. But it seems like people running CM or people with a ONE-X benefit from this the most.

All I can say is it doubled my sequential writes according to androbench.

coolsilver

This really had a difference on my Thunderbolt with ICS.

kixofmyg0t

This is best suited for people with the 4.1 and lower kernels like the HTC ONE-X and current CM kernels.

According to androbench I was getting 5MB sequential writes before this and 10MB writes afterward on my RAZR HD which this wasn’t even designed for. It’s a simple fix.

Jennifer Kovacs

Before everyone goes and installs this, it will only help a certain few devices like the nexus 7

SD_Scott

I would think this would be especially helpful for all those dirty flashes… Will run AnTutu before and after then report back.

when you installed the Shiny ROM, did you just flash and that was it, or did you have to go back and install the SU as well? im thinking about getting this ROM since Muzzy was laggy and i heard Shiny is as close as im gonna get to Bugless Beast. Any insight would be appreciated.

SD_Scott

Always follow the dev’s instructions but I believe I flashed bootloader, radios, rom, and su all in one go… Haven’t had any problems. Dirty flashed last update w/ no problems as well.

This one might actually improve performance in some cases, seeder will not.

cantcurecancer

Are you saying that Seeder does not work at all? Before a long thread on the AOSP community discussion argues otherwise.

DaveTea

Yea, I am saying it is placebo just as Google and countless others have said after taking a close look at its ‘fix’. Although I should say it might provide a small increase in response time due to it keeping the CPU ‘awake’, but its alleged extra entropy is a myth.

I really disagree. It’s easy to claim that it’s a placebo, but I can tangibly see the difference it makes on my Nexus 7. Before and after. It’s pretty asinine and presumptuous to claim that literally thousands of people are wrong when they can see the difference that it makes. I’m not saying that because vast numbers believe it works, it means it does…I’m saying there is obviously something that this fix is doing, or else there wouldn’t be news stories, XDA and code.google.com threads, apps and zip packages being made, and kernel developers (who are among the wisest Android nerds) implementing the fix in their kernels/apps.

Christian

You’re right, but there’s a difference between “it works” and “it works the right way”. Obviously it improves performance one way or another, but I highly doubt it has anything to do with the entropy pool that Android is supposedly so hungry for. Being a developer of Android and other platforms myself, I can say the devs whom I know have not been implementing this by default into their projects, and I can also say that I haven’t found any sound evidence for it on the technical side of things. The app that this DL post is talking about, on the other hand, has a pretty strong technical foundation, as it can be (and is) implemented in a lot of systems from Windows 8 to Android. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but I just think it’s important to point out that just because something seems to work doesn’t mean it’s truly doing what it’s supposed to, and no platform should be based on magical software.

basically what it tries to do is reduce the number of blocks that are unnecessarily occupied on the storage device. therefore when your phone tries to write something to storage, it doesn’t have to waste time rearranging blocks to find a chunk of open storage space. on the other hand, Seeder helps replenish the pool of data available to the kernel used for the generation of random numbers (which is needed often). so Seeder decreases the execution time for procedures that require random data and this attempts to decrease the time that “disk” I/O takes.

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